Month: July 2017

One of the hard things about talking about research (and especially research outside of structured academic work) is figuring out where to start. Figuring out where to start is difficult for a number of reasons, but one of the big ones has to do with what is sometimes called tacit knowledge. Those are the things that are obvious to you once you know about them – but utterly mystifying to people who don’t have experience with it.

Tacit knowledge isn’t just a thing for researchers or students or teachers! It’s also an issue for things like cooking or knitting or picking up any new hobby or craft. It’s true for many jobs.

And it’s true for Pagans – think about all the parts of going to a public ritual. Where is it? What do you bring? What should you expect? What’s polite? What’s rude? What do you do if you feel uncomfortable? What is it okay to ask about? Will anyone ask you to do something you really don’t want to do? And then, depending on the ritual, there may be a whole lot of assumed tacit knowledge about things like quarters and elements and the nature of deity and the theory of magic going on.

Clearly, tacit knowledge is something that deserves some quality time on this blog. This post is an introduction to the topic, and I’ll circle back to more specifics in future posts.

The photo for this post is a photo I took at the Greenwich Observatory on a trip to London in 2015. It’s a pocket astronomical device that does about half a dozen things, and is the size of a pocket watch when it’s closed. To use it, you need a tremendous amount of knowledge about the different tools it includes, and how to interpret the markings and settings, most of which are quite tiny – more reminders than information.

What is tacit knowledge?

Tacit knowledge is often defined as “the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer by writing it down or verbalising it.

Tacit knowledge is often about having experience with a thing, and trying it out for ourselves and figuring out how it works. (Guidance can help, but a lot of tacit knowledge things, we need to have that hands on experience before they make sense and stick.)

Librarians talk a lot about this kind of thing, because it affects how we teach people how to find and evaluate information. Information literacy skills rely on a lot of tacit knowledge – and to make things more complicated, what that knowledge is changes, sometimes very rapidly.

In the Pagan community, we often talk about religious mysteries, which are definitely a related idea.

In future posts, I’m going to be talking about different pieces in more detail, but here I want to lay out a few broad categories and give you things to think about.

1) Structure

Two classic examples for tacit knowledge are understanding how a book works and how a print newspaper works.

For books, it’s how to use the table of contents, index, and references or bibliography to find information in the book or elsewhere that talks about what we’re interested in. For print newspapers, it’s things like how placement on the page or within the section indicates different things, what cues indicate something is an editorial or opinion, and much more.

On the web, we can look at things like how a page or site is structured, if there’s advertising (and what that indicates), whether there’s information about authorship or source, and how to find it if there is. On social media, it can involve understanding how posts get shared, memes get started, and things can change context over time.

2) Contextual cues

A lot of our society is designed to give us cues about how to do things or how seriously to take them. But we’re often not very consciously aware that that’s going on. Design choices can encourage us to use one door or path over another (or to buy one brand or type of product over another).

Many of us have a sense that Comic Sans is not a font choice with much gravitas, or that lots of blinking images across our screens may be someone trying to catch our attention with flash rather than substance. But we may not realise why we read those things that way.

There are also things that we learn by being in a space for a while. People who are active users of Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook will become familiar with the customs there (or at least in the circles they spend time with there) about how to tag things, what kinds of tags are considered useful or acceptable in that set of people, what customs are around things like warning for possibly upsetting content.

People online also signal things in other ways. The theme or account name we use on a blog or service. The avatars or icons or profile photos we choose. The email addresses we share in public. (An email with a legal name is different from WitchyChick333 is different from a magical name.) What sites are linked to (or not linked to). The terms different groups use for the same thing. Which hashtags or other tags get used. Which don’t.

3) Expected audience

One of the most complicated things about information is realising that different audiences sometimes matter a lot. It’s extremely hard to write material that is accessible to someone new to a subject, and to someone who knows a fair bit about it.

Aiming for a middle path, or including supplemental explanations can still leave lots of people out. (And that’s before we get into actual accessibility issues, which are many and also important!)

One of the things I see a lot in the Pagan community is a thing of not understanding how academic writing works – who academics are mostly writing for, what their goals are, how topics of research might be picked, and how work fits into an existing conversation in a particular field (or interdisciplinary conversation.) This all adds up to a lot of assumed tacit knowledge.

Likewise, the way we write for people in the Pagan community (and especially for people in our particular path, or at least general focus) is often a lot different than the way we’d explain things to a family member or non-Pagan friend. This can sometimes make it very hard to share information in an order that makes sense, or it can mean we need to circle back several times to explain things as people get comfortable with earlier topics.

This kind of thing is why time often helps – if you get introduced to a new concept, and then see it in action a couple of times, then talk about it again, you’ll often make more sense of it.

4) Citations and references

Citations are a whole bog of tacit knowledge of their own. Why do we have them? Why do they matter? How do we handle them?

They’re especially boggy when we talk about informal references – the kind of thing we do in a casual conversation, or an online social media space, where we’re often not going to trot out “Oh, this is on page 64 of The Best Book About Dinosaurs” and the full publisher and author information.

And yet, these things are very obscure unless you know how they work. What are all those things? How do you sort out abbreviations? Why do the different pieces make a difference?

(And that’s before we get into the sources themselves, and how we identify a scam journal or publisher, or someone who’s hiding their actual goals for some reason.)

5) Location and orientation

Most people know that there are methods to how libraries put things on shelves. However, many people don’t know (and why would you) where those systems come from, or why it’s hard to change terms, or what’s involved in doing so. Or they don’t realise that the two major systems in use in a lot of the English speaking world (Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress) both have their origins in a very Christian-centric and fairly colonialist worldview, and how that affects how subjects were set up.

The subject term “Wicca” is actually a really interesting case study here, and will be getting its own post and other materials in the future.

When I’m talking about orientation here, it’s also about how we move through information. Many people also don’t know all the different things your public library might be able to do for you, or what some options are if you move beyond what your public library can do. The same goes for online searches: there are a lot of things we can find with search engines, but what about the things the search engines don’t see? Or don’t show us? Poking at the tacit knowledge issues here can bring us huge benefits.

Conclusion

As you can see, these are all very large topics, and I’ve covered them only in the most general terms here, to give you an idea of what we’re going to dig at in future. If you’ve got a particular topic you’d like to see sooner than later, drop me a note on the contact form or in the comments.

I adore the puzzle of helping someone find information that makes their life better. Also great is the chance to help someone learn skills that mean they can do it themselves. If that’s the thing that’s helpful. (Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes people just want the information, because they’re overwhelmed with other things in their life. It’s part of my job to figure that out, or figure out how to ask in a way that works out.)

Here’s how I got there.

I’ve had two conversations this week about how much I love my day job.

(One with my mother, who’s back in my area helping a friend, and one with my boss, because it was my annual review today).

The reasons I love my day job are also the reasons I started Seek Knowledge, Find Wisdom.

My last library job, I didn’t get a lot of chances to answer reference questions – I was usually on shifts where we just didn’t get as many. I was also doing other library tasks that meant I got fewer through class liaison relationships or other interactions.

(Reference is the library term for “People ask us questions and we find sources that answer their question or get them information they need for their research.”)

I’d done a lot of it at my first library job, in a high school library. I helped people find books to read. I understood them balancing high-achieving academic expectations (and parents) and a need to do something else with their brains sometimes. (Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.)

I knew they had a lot riding on some projects and research – and more than that, they were great kids who cared about doing the project well, not just getting a good grade. And sometimes, there were kids who needed a place to spend some time that wasn’t with a teacher who’d grade them or a coach with expectations. Just librarians who’d say hi, and maybe suggest a book.

My current job reminded me how much I’d missed it. Immediately.

I overlapped with my predecessor for a couple of weeks (she was retiring) so she could get me up to speed. The second day, she threw me an interesting and complicated research question to track down. It was a question about the sculptor of a particular famous bust (well, for values of famous: it was really well known in the 1800s, much less so now) and whether there were other copies, and what else we knew about it.

It was hard to figure out what to look for, about a topic I hadn’t done a lot with. Once I dug up some of the answers (which included asking her what info we already had about it, in filing cabinets I had only just learned about), I got to answer the question.

I had to figure out how to write the response, to hit the line between friendly and not too informal, to write like the skilled professional I am, but not be stuffy. A big part of being a reference librarian is figuring out how to present the information sometimes.

It took me a lot longer than it’d take me today.

For all that was overwhelming, I loved it. I knew then that this job was going to be hard work to learn all the subject material about the main topics we focus on that was new to me . But it was going to be so much fun.

I was right.

I get to do things like that a lot. Pretty much every day, I get to answer a question from someone where I know it’s going to make their life better or mean something to them. I know how rare that is, too, so I really appreciate it.

A bunch of the questions I get are easier than that first one.

Do we have this book? Can we get this article? Can we help with this common question? What’re the recommended books about this topic we get all the time? (We have a list. And sometimes a handout.) Someone’s just discovered a famous person associated with our school, and has questions. (Enthusiastic fourth-graders – or high schoolers – are the best.)

Some questions are a little tedious to track down, a lot of searching through lists or being systematic about where we look for obscure things.

But some questions, we’re the only people who stand a chance of answering them. Or we’re the best chance. (There are other institutions that deal with our topic, but not that many, and most of them don’t have full-time reference help. At best, there’s someone doing it along with a couple of other roles.)

Those questions, I go home feeling great when I find an answer. Or even if I know we’ve looked everywhere and come up blank.

There are lots of other great reference librarians out there.

I know some of them. I know there’s a lot more.

But I’ve been around the Pagan community for a long time (and around the SF community, and around academics, and…) And I know that there aren’t enough. That people get frustrated or overwhelmed. Some people have had lousy experience with judgy library staff, or people who told them there was only one way to do research, and that way didn’t work for hem.

Then there’s the fact that the kinds of research skills that many of us learned in school don’t always work for things like religious or spiritual research – some tools work, but others need some adjustment or people need some additional ways to apply them or evaluate what they find.

Frankly, many of the things we learned about research in school don’t always work for medical or legal or business or internet privacy and security information, either, but that’s a whole other post. Or series of posts.

Not everyone’s got a great librarian handy where they live. (Or maybe you do, but you can’t always get to the library. Or you’ve got questions about topics you don’t want to bring up at your public library, for various reasons.)

I want to give you options.

I love what I do. I love finding information for people. And not just finding information, but figuring out which sources are more available, or better for a particular goal. I think every bit of information is giving people that much more choice, that much more freedom. It’s not my job to tell you what to do. It’s my job to help you figure out the possibilities.

And that’s why I started Seek Knowledge, Find Wisdom. Reference help for esoteric and eclectic topics. It’s up to you whether that’s some Pagan or magical technique or concept or historical tidbit, or something for a fiction book you’re writing, or trying to figure out the best way to do research on a topic you want to learn about.

I moved here a bit over two years ago, but with one thing and another, I was busy in ways that made it hard to sort out my personal library for a long time. Since December, I’ve spent part of two vacation weeks sorting out my books, including the second week of July.

I’m delighted to say they’re all on shelves now in some semblance of order that pleases me, and entered into LibraryThing. I’ve got a bit more work to do, but I’m now at a stage where I can work on it in much smaller pieces that fit into my day to day life.

One of the things I was thinking about while I was doing this was S.R. Ranganathan, who in 1931 wrote the Five Laws of Library Science. These are like ‘laws of physics’ not ‘laws of the United States’, which is to say they’re concepts for understanding how things work or should work, so we can create practical models that work with our physical and intellectual world, not against it.

All of which makes me want to talk about organising a personal library, and how this librarian does it.

Ragnathan’s Laws

One reason these are so popular is that they are stated very simply. (Though they have a lot of room for nuance and discussion.) Here they are:

Books are for use.

Every reader his / her book.

Every book its reader.

Save the time of the reader.

The library is a growing organism.

So how do those apply to a personal library? How I apply them may be different than how you apply them, but here’s some food for thought.

1) Books are for use.

When applied to institutions, the idea behind this law is that books should be available. Ranganathan was familiar with libraries where books were chained up, could be used only after extensive application processes, or only by people who could provide certain kinds of references. That’s a very different model than most public libraries in the United States in the 21st century.

For personal libraries, I think this is a great place to apply the core Marie Kondo question – does this thing bring you joy? Is it actively useful? Or are you keeping it for other reasons?

I don’t think people should get rid of books if they don’t want to (minus actual health and safety or practical reasons like moving or moving into a much smaller apartment) but it’s definitely good to think about why we’re holding on to physical objects.

My personal library these days is about 400 print books, and over 600 ebooks. (I got rid of a lot of print when I moved from Minneapolis to Maine, for reasons that are obvious if you think about moving print books.) These days, I mostly read print in the bathtub – I’ll come back to that – and ebooks everywhere else.

Here’s what I chose to keep in print:

Books with specific sentimental value. Not just ‘a friend gave this to me’ but things where the book itself has a lot of specific resonance. 1066 and All That which I remember reading with my father. Books he wrote.

Books where the print format works better for me. A large book of illustrated stories about the constellations. Cookbooks. Herbalism books.

Books without an ebook version. For obvious reasons, since this is the only way to have that book.

Books that had an ebook version, I made notes about, and have been slowly adding titles back to my collection as my budget allows if I want to replace a copy. There are places I made exceptions (I have a complete set of Dorothy L. Sayers novels in print, because my brain wants to read them in print.)

Your decisions might be different! That’s to be expected, because I bet you use your books differently than I do.

One other part of books being for use for me is that I’m hard on the physical objects. (With a few exceptions of rare and hard to replace books that have particular value – I’ve got a first printing of the Charles Vess Book of Ballads, for example – that link describes the second printing.)

I read in the bath. I read while I’m eating. I dogear pages. (Only in my own books, all of these.) I want the books to be something I use, not something I worry about damaging. I take reasonable precautions, of course, and sometimes I have to replace a physical copy. But normally it’s the content I care about deeply, and the physical item is the way to get that.

2) Every reader their book.

In large libraries, this rule guides librarians to look at the entire community they serve when deciding what books to focus on. (Since basically no library can buy – or house – everything. It’s also a rule about not judging people by what they want to read.

Back around the turn of the 20th century, there was a significant movement in public libraries in the United States to have libraries focus on morally uplifting literature – things that would ‘improve’ the reader. If you’ve walked into a public library recently, you’ll see that’s not true these days. But librarians still argue about how much libraries should focus on books versus movies and dvds. If they should be collecting video games. If certain genres (romance, or genres tightly associated with particular communities, like urban fiction) should be part of the collection.

Individual different libraries come to different decisions about these things, and how they do that is a topic for other posts.

For me, it means that I think about what books fill out my collection. What does this book bring me that isn’t already here? “Something amusing to occupy me that’s similar to other things I’ve liked before” is a perfectly fine reason.

Knowing how a book I’m considering relates to what I already have and don’t have yet helps me make better choices. (And since I’ve always read more than my budget entirely supports, this is important!)

3) Every book its reader.

This is the flip side of the second law. This means that every book that someone wants to read has a place in the library, even if a relatively small number of people want to read it.

For me, this is a reminder in my personal library that it’s my personal library. The books that are there make sense to me, for reasons I don’t have to defend. (Though I do choose to keep my main LibraryThing account private for a variety of reasons.)

In a world where there’s often a lot of performative norming, especially on social media, this is a pretty powerful concept.

We’ve probably all seen the discussions where people are shamed because they’re reading something from a problematic author, or not just reading things from authors valued particularly by that community or group, right? And how poisonous that can get sometimes?

I definitely believe in thinking about what I’m reading and why I’m reading it. But I think that is – has to be – my own call.

Sometimes I find myself doing what I’ve come to call processing reading, where I find myself reading certain kinds of stories, for an extended period of time, as I try to work through particular emotions or reactions or situations. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious why I’m stuck on a thing, but sometimes it isn’t. (And often, during my witchcraft training, this would happen and it would take me months to figure out what my subconscious was working on!)

Letting other people control what goes into my head has never worked well for me. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Especially for something as personal as reading.

4) Save the time of the reader.

Applied to larger libraries, this has to do with things like signs and catalogs and information about how to find books.

In my personal library, I come back to “When I want to find this book, where am I going to look for it?”

I normally group my physical books by genre and subgenre because those are the things I’m most likely to remember about a book or want to look for a book by. Here’s some examples of my current shelving:

Stars : astronomy and astrology, because I have some books that are about both.

Ritual technology : magical and ritual techniques – though not ‘how to write a ritual itself’

Rituals : which is the shelf for collections of ritual works, and larger ritual structure discussion.

Anthologies : because they tend to be cross-genre but I’ll remember that it’s an anthology.

Embodied life : books about being in a physical body, with all its quirks. (Cleaning, health, exercise, etc.)

In my current shelving, I also thought about making sure the books I’m likely to want to grab most easily are convenient for that – my cooking books are in the shelf nearest the kitchen (on the other side of the wall in the living room), and in my bedroom the physical copies I keep but don’t read often are in the bit of shelving that I have to move something to get to.

5) The library is a growing organism.

This last law is about remembering the world changes, and we should adapt with it. In libraries, the approaches (and books, and materials) that were great 20 years ago are no longer sufficient. We’ve got new technology, different needs, communities the libraries in are changing.

In my personal library, it’s a reminder that this book that was hugely meaningful ten years and two moves ago might not be a thing I need to hang onto forever. It’s a reminder that a book that I love can have some serious flaws (and that means some things about whether I should recommend it to others). It means I should look at what I’m doing periodically with my books (and other sources of information) and make sure that’s still working for me.

And on a practical level, it means I should think about how much space I have for shelving, and what I’m going to do about that. In my current apartment, I have a bit of expansion space, possibly, but in other places shelf space has been so limited that I definitely had to watch how many print books I brought home. Some people have a “One book in, I have to get rid of another.” (Yet another reason I love ebooks.)

What does it all mean?

There are hundreds of different ways to look at organising a personal library, whether we’re talking about print books, or ebooks, or videos, or bookmarks, or podcasts, or any of the many other possible formats. Having a guide like Ranganathan’s laws helps me remember what really matters most when I’m making decisions.

It’s not a quick and simple checklist (I’m working on one to help people with these questions!) On the other hand, five rules are pretty easy to pin up and put somewhere obvious.

How do you apply these concepts in your own library? Leave a comment, use my contact form, suggest what you do on Twitter.

But above and beyond the content, I’m always delighted to see interesting catchy articles that talk about the amazing things going on in archives these days.

Bonus tip: Atlas Obscura is a long-running website that highlights quirky or interesting history. They started as a tiny little two person blog back when, but in the past year or so they’ve started doing longer detailed pieces, many of which are fantastic intros to new resources and hidden gems.

A brief pause for a technical note

Here is where I should note that I’m a librarian, not an archivist: there’s overlap between the two, and we share the same professional degree. But the trained archivists I work with have a whole lot of training on topics like preservation, and digitization, and how you label archives materials that I don’t have.

That said, I work really closely with our archivist, and I’m very grateful she exists, because she knows all this important stuff I don’t know. (And she’s glad I exist, because mostly she’d rather work with the materials than answer reference questions, and I consider reference questions the most fun thing ever, even the ones I’ve basically answered a dozen times before.)

Here’s what I didn’t really know before I got my current job two years ago, and started working a lot more closely with an archivist:

There are all sorts of tools for making materials available. Ok, I knew this part. Just not the rest of the details.

Some of them are things you might use as an individual (like Flickr) but there are other tools that make digitizing entire books feasible in a very short period of time, compared to what it used to be (scanning or photographing each page.)

The Internet Archive (and some other places, but many archives use the Internet Archive for a variety of reasons) makes it easy to upload entire books (that we can do this with, so things out of copyright and/or things an institution can give permission to make available.)

For books with print text, they also do optical character recognition on the test, producing a machine-readable and machine-searchable copy of the text. This text isn’t perfect, but it works pretty well for many common uses.

To give you a sense of what this means, my predecessor had a painstakingly indexed list of all student names mentioned in our annual reports. Done by hand, over months, and it only has the students, so finding information about teachers or staff or other kinds of people associated with the school was overwhelming to search.

I can, with about 15 mouseclicks and keystrokes, load a volume of our annual reports, search across multiple years for a given name, and then click to the places where it’s been found. It takes maybe two minutes, depending on how quickly pages load.

Handwriting is hard.

Here’s the thing. Computers are pretty good at figuring out printed text. But they’re really lousy at handwriting. Especially any handwriting that is at all quirky. (Like your average Renaissance manuscript.)

That means that for handwritten manuscripts, you can make the images available fairly easily, but that’s not always a lot of help to researchers – it can be very time consuming to figure out what’s there (and if it’s worth the effort to spend more time on it), and of course, not everyone has the skills to read various forms of handwriting. (The term for this is paleography, and it’s something historians often learn as part of their degree and education.)

Also, some of these people had truly horrendous handwriting for their time period.

(At work we have a 20th century collection that includes handwritten notes from someone associated with a major historical figure whose handwriting has baffled at least half a dozen researchers. We currently have a couple of volunteers who are the world’s experts in deciphering this particular person’s handwriting, and we’re really sure the transcriptions they’re working on are going to reveal new and interesting information people do actually care about. Plus a lot of other random things like what the dogs and garden were up to – we’re mostly not transcribing those.)

Finally, of course, untranscribed or undescribed images aren’t accessible. They’re not available to people with visual impairments, and they can be tremendously hard to access for people with learning differences like dyslexia. Or just plain people who struggle with other people’s handwriting.

What’s particularly cool about this is that you don’t need to be anywhere near the collection, and you can do as much or as little as you like. You usually don’t get to choose your topic, but if you’ve got a particular passion (and can commit a bit of time) try contacting an archive that deals with your topic and asking if they need help. They may not have a snazzy online set up to do it yet, but they might be delighted to send you images and ask for a text transcription.

Today’s resource

I’m a big fan of the Search/Research blog, by Dan Russell for improving my search skills. (He works at Google, but this is a side project).

He posts challenges with a question (and people reply in the comments with thoughts) and then a week or so later, he posts the results, so you can see how he did something and learn a bit along the way.

He just tackled a favourite topic of mine, a long-extinct plant that, as he says was “something so valuable that it was depicted on ancient coins as an emblem of wealth.”

I knew immediately what he was talking about (this is a thing that happens to me a lot: I am a magpie of random bits of knowledge) which is one way to figure out an answer but I loved seeing how people sorted out searching for this.

Additional observations

He mentions that “Roman extinct plant” doesn’t pull up the list of People Also Ask for him, but it did for me when I tried it just now. Nice example of either how the filter bubble affects things, or the effect of people searching on this topic as a result of his posts. Hard to tell which!

Unreliable narrators:

I also really love Dan calling out that historical sources aren’t always reliable. Especially about medicine. Or science. Or, come to that, a number of other topics.

Pliny the Elder is a great example: he did a lot of writing about things that are useful because they survived when other historical medical and natural history writing didn’t. But he’s not the most reliable source for actual useful information.

If you want to know more about Pliny, the podcast Sawbones did an episode all about Pliny in 2016. He keeps coming up in their discussions of medical history, again, because a lot of his material survived when other people’s didn’t. They provide tons of reasons his medical advice is not something you should be following.

PS

The image for this post has one lonely fennel bulb, which is in the same family as Silphium. I thought that rather appropriate.